Bomarzo
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My Personal Diary reading Bomarzo
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Sounds like Pier Francesco is narrating his story, looking back on his life as an older man. Then 4 pages in, talking about his beloved Bomarzo, we read: "Our dwelling changed with the passage of time and lost all trace of grandeur, until its last anonymous remains disappeared in 1937 when Benito Mussolini ordered the opening of the Via della Conciliazione, which gave a clear view of Saint Peter's. --- Wow! Well, Pier did tell us how his horoscope stated how he would live forever!
No wonder Pier was afraid of that Roman palace. Recollection of his beloved grandmother Diana "conjuring up with her appearance the elves and vampires inhabited it."Reflecting back when an adult on the Roman palace: "the wind slipped in, making the tapestries quiver and animating the ghostly scenes for my superstitious anguish, as if it were really taking place there and those beings and monsters were the only living things in the great house . . . like another spector, the fearful shadow of my father passed back and forth; and to some icy corridors through which my brothers Girolamo and Maerbale, growling like wolves, would chase me and threaten me with pikes and rapiers that were yellow with rust." ----- No wonder he felt more at home in Bomarzo!
Diana Orsini furnished me with what nature had denied me: a security in myself, in my own strength, which, since it was lacking in me, I had to seek in other forces, real or fantastic, until I could afford myself a vigor and a faith that came, if not from me, from a mysterious cohort, as old as the history of my family, which gathered about my weak figure the breastplates . . . -- Turns out, Pier draws strength from his family's connection with the brown bear. In a way, this reminds me of shamanism. Curious how much connection we can have with other forms of life if we open ourselves up to the possibility.
A hunch or hump and a deformation of his right leg: Pier has to live with this. He father couldn't get over his son Pier was a deformed hunchback. "My horror of ugliness and my passion for beauty in human beings, in objects, in poetic games, had produced disappointment and bitterness in me, but it had given my life an exalted tone and a certain tormented grandeur: to came from a horror of myself and the resulting disgust caused in my by any teratological aberration.
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Chapter 1 - The Horoscope
Pier Francesco Orsini, the first-person narrator on the coincidence of his being born at 2:00 in the morning on March 6, the same time and date (but different years) as Michelangelo: "In truth, the stars that presided over our respective appearances on life's chessboard had arranged their players for quite different matches." Curiously, wiki notes his dates as 1523-1585 but on the first page the narrator relates his date of birth as 1512.
I plan to take my time - it could take me 6 months to carefully read this novel.